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#1 2016-11-16 12:16:44

Tom B
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Registered: 2014-01-15
Posts: 187
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Macbook pro screen flicker after upgrade

Since a full system upgrade earlier today I have screen flickering in KDE.

This is a Macbook Pro  11,4 Retina with an i7 4870HQ and hybrid radeon graphics (which I've never needed/used) so it's just using intel graphics.

It's not a hardware issue as I also have OSX installed and it doesn't happen there. dmesg shows several broadcom issues, but installing either b43-firmware, broadcom-wl-dmks or broadcom-wl-dmks stops wifi working. lspci | grep Network shows it's a BCM43602 (rev 01).

The following threads offer suggestions:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=196888
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2266696

The latter suggests it's a broadcom driver issue but installing the driver breaks wifi and does not fix the screen flicker issue. I have xf86-video-intel installed. And installed xf86-video-ati just in case it's a problem with the hybrid graphics.

I'm not sure why this started today, I'd be very grateful for any suggestions!

edit: The flicker stops if I change the resolution to 1920x1080 instead of the native 2880x1800

Last edited by Tom B (2016-11-16 12:30:55)

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#2 2016-11-16 12:40:42

WorMzy
Forum Moderator
From: Scotland
Registered: 2010-06-16
Posts: 11,787
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Re: Macbook pro screen flicker after upgrade

Mod note: not a pacman/upgrade issue, moving to kernel/hardware.


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#3 2016-11-16 12:53:11

Tom B
Member
Registered: 2014-01-15
Posts: 187
Website

Re: Macbook pro screen flicker after upgrade

Update: The two suggestions in the wiki ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/In … flickering )

Rc6 sleep modes (see intel#RC6_sleep_modes_(enable_rc6)), can be disabled with i915.enable_rc6=0.
Panel Self Refresh (PSR) FS#49628 FS#49371 FS#50605, enabled by default since kernel mainline 4.6. To disable this feature use the option i915.enable_psr=0.

Appear to have no effect

edit: I wanted to try differet DRI settings as suggested by the wiki but if I create 20-intel.conf with any contents, X will not start and says "No screens found". The `20-intel.conf` I'm using is a simplified one:


```

Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel Graphics"
Driver "intel"
# Option "DRI" "2"
EndSection
```

With this file, X fails to start at all.

edit 2: It appears that intel graphics are not being recognised at all and everything is being handled by the AMD GPU. I wouldn't really care but it appears to be the cause of the flicker. xrandr --listproviders shows only the AMD GPU and not the Intel Graphics I was expecting.

edit 3: I tried the LTS kernel, the flicker is still there so more likely a driver issue then a kernel issue. I booted into an 6 month old Mint Live USB which doesn't have the flicker problem and works as expected, and xrandr also shows a single provider so presumably that's using the amd gpu as well.

Last edited by Tom B (2016-11-16 19:52:41)

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#4 2016-11-20 13:44:07

Tom B
Member
Registered: 2014-01-15
Posts: 187
Website

Re: Macbook pro screen flicker after upgrade

The plot thickens: This is temperamental. Roughly 1 in 5 times the mac boots or wakes up from suspend the issue happens. Once it starts, it's difficult to stop it and takes several suspend/wake cycles or boots to get back into a normal state.

However, connecting an external display via HDMI (i didn't test displayport) fixes it 100% of the time, it must issue some kind of xorg reset. I'd be happy if I could feign this HDMI disconnect and mimic whatever connecting the monitor does, even if I have to run a command every time the flicker happens I'd be happy with that workaround. I thought `xrandr -q` might do it but unfortunately not. Are there any xrandr commands I can run to force a complete redraw of the screens?

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#5 2016-11-21 22:28:57

howdoicomputer
Member
Registered: 2015-04-06
Posts: 1

Re: Macbook pro screen flicker after upgrade

This also hit me as well. Same behavior. I noticed that it's less of a deal when I use LXDE over Gnome 3.

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